Fences by August Wilson
After reading fence’s by August Wilson I was generally moved by the text. It’s about this baseball player named Troy Maxin and how he treats his son like dirt and cheats on his wife Rose. Troy wasn’t able to play real baseball in the Negro leagues because he was too old by the time it was made. So he married rose and had Cory. Cory like troy was very athletic and he had gotten a scholarship for football but only if Troy signed the paper, otherwise his coach wouldn’t let him…turns out his father wouldn’t sign the paper because he wasn’t able to pursue sports so he didn’t want Cory to be able to…he was jealous. He’d always treated Cory badly.
I don’t get why he would do such a thing to his son? Maybe it was because that’s all he knew after all he has been through. Troy was kicked out of the house at age 14…he had to fend for himself and had some really tuff times. But isn’t it the parents job to make sure their children get as good a life as they possibly can? This made me think so I looked back to the text and found that he didn’t want Cory to be anything like him, and that’s why he didn’t let him do sports. He won’t let Cory live his dreams. If I was Cory id probably get real depressed because his own father doesn’t like him. But then I’d get real mad. And that’s exactly what happened!
He confronted and fought his father because he had had enough. I can really connect to Cory. There are times when my parents piss me off so much that I just lose it. I just want them to be gone. I want to show them that they can’t control me anymore. But I’ve never really had the guts to really fight any of them. I might talk back and get up in their face but I would never hit them. But that’s one thing Cory did. He knows that his father can’t beat him anymore and he took his chance. He was just so fed up everything he’d been holding in for years finally came out. At the same time Cory wanted to cry and wanted to beat the living out of his father.
I chose do a scene from this book as my monologue for drama. Partly because, it was such a deep, realistic play. I really wanted to try and portray this character as much as I could. So I kept re reading this play over and over again until I felt like I could feel exactly what cory was feeling toward his father.
Overall I think the relationship between Cory and Troy is complicated because I feel like they both love each other but they don’t know to show it until they no longer have each other. One example is when Cory came back from the marines to go to his father’s funeral, his daughter that he had with another women said that Troy used to say that the room she slept in was called ‘Cory’s room’. Even in that small thing you can still tell that Troy missed his son. This reminds me of ’ X-Men fist class’ because Xavier and magneto were fighting and were being ‘mean’ to each other but when Xavier got shot magneto jumped to his aid and was ready to kill anyone that would hurt him because he really loved him like a brother. And he didn’t truly fully realize that until he thought he would lose Xavier.
I really liked this book not only because I could relate it to myself but all the action and words were so powerful. This was a truly amazing play.
